Mambo Taxi

three loosely connected things make a post

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 05:29:21 GMT

For a while I worked for a company called "Openflows" which did consulting on open-source for non-profits and leftist organizations. It was satisfying work- and I only stopped working for them when the University offered me a full-time job in 2004. Their founder in Toronto, Jesse Hirsch, has been a tech columnist for the CBC for 25 years. He just had an interview with Jesse Brown on Canadaland podcast to talk about his possibly last broadcast on CBC, in which he asks "why CBC continues to promote Facebook after we've seen what that company has done to undermine democracy. CBC refused to post the segment online, raising questions about what you can and cannot say on our public broadcaster." It's a compelling listen, and makes me wonder how to react to the morally awful behaviours at the top of facebook.

Before I worked for Openflows, I was self-employed and in a partnership doing web consulting, from 1996 onward- while I was still in my last year at University. To tell you how early this was, we registered the domain name coder.com. Last November I was approached by a startup based in Austin, TX, looking to buy that domain name. I had really stopped working on those projects after starting working at the University, so it made the most sense to accept their (I think very fair) offer. I just looked them up. Their project is in public alpha and appears to be a success. "It's like google docs for programming." You get a web-based IDE and a virtual server, hooked to all sorts of useful things you can easily install. If you want to run more projects, or you want to harness 96 virtual servers at once for really quick compile times, you'll be able to pay them $5 a month. I expect the most exciting part comes with what more tools they might hook to the back-end for their subscribers. They just raised a cool $4.5 Million from venture capital, so they are doing OK for themselves. I sort of wonder whether they will incubate some kid's project that will replace facebook... I will say that I have no regrets about the path I took out of school. I was never interested in working startup hours, or risking my half of our mortgage on a dream idea. Especially since these big dream ideas often turn into crazy nightmares, don't they?...

On Tuesday, I'm giving a talk at the University's annual tech conference, WatITis, titled Perspectives on co-op employment and user-centered web-application development. This will be interesting. I'm motivated to do this because I really like my job right now, which is largely project management and supervising co-op student programmers. This is certainly a shift from what I was doing a decade ago, which was solo programming and sysadmin work. I'm keen on programming things that make academics' lives easier; and on giving student employees the real-world experience as we do this.

I'm very curious what the people who come to my talk will be looking for. I wish I could ask them in advance.

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The Name Game

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 02:37:10 GMT

I have an interest in coincidences. When the fabric of one's life develops a few slip-stitches. The kind of thing you generally don't notice until suddenly, as if in The Twilight Zone, your life has a pattern you can just barely see and can't possibly understand. Then the moment passes and you're back in the humdrum world.

Of course your average day has millions of chances for "a strange thing" to happen, most with little actual effect on the world. But if you look for strange things, like magic you'll see more of them. Occasionally, they're useful; like getting a day's worth of good elevator karma; or getting a phone call from the person you most want to talk to. But mostly their intrinsic value is simply getting a chance to grin and feel like part of the universe sort of makes sense somehow.

Once upon a time, I thought I had an uncommon first name. Then I left for school, and lo, Daniels were popping out of the woodwork. In fact it turns out that Daniel Allen is not an uncommon name.

It started in my first week at school when I started getting snail mail for the other Daniel Allen, then a Senior. My second week I learned my unique Cornell user ID was shared between myself (Daniel Robert Allen) and Daniel Robert Adinolphi. We were both dra1 for a week, despite protests by Cornell Information Technologies that it was strictly impossible. Douglas Adams was right on target with the Someone Else's Problem Field. People simply won't believe reality if it's inconvenient. Interestingly enough, dra1 also works in Information Technology, which I learned from a mutual friend who ran into him at a security conference.

When I was a teenager I went to a gathering of 200 Quaker teens (YouthQuake in Glorietta New Mexico, 1994), and met a total of five other Quaker Daniels and Dans. That was fun, especially since I got to introduce some of them to each other.

In 2003 at Summer Gathering of Friends General Conference, I played the card-game Fluxx with a Daniel, Daniel, dan, and Gary. And those were just the people staying in our dorm-hall.

There have been three Daniels on the payroll of my former consulting company, including business-partner (now professor), Jason Daniel Hartline. In 2000-2001 I consulted for Millennium Pharmaceuticals. My office-mate Daniel Noël had just moved from Canada to Boston; I moved from Boston to Canada eight months later.

There's also the Daniel Allen House in Walpole, MA, and Dan Allen Drive at NC State. I guess it's gratifying- and possibly weird- that Google thinks I'm one of the most authorative Daniel Allens.

When I first got onto facebook, I found a group named "Yes, my name is Daniel Allen too." I became member number 53. Then the group vanished. No idea what happened.

Last but most definitely not least, my sweetie is a dan, with whom I have been lucky to share just about half our respective lives together.

So, that's the long version of the story when people learn that we're "Dan and Daniel" and I say, "We didn't plan it that way."

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Five facts

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 02:23:35 GMT

1) I used to blog regularly, and I miss it. The book of faces has inertia going for it; and I'm not yet pulling the plug there, but I want to try this again, in long form. So welcome! Pull up a chair!

2) In 2012 I started a blog about being Quaker. It's named after work by one of my favourite Quaker poets, and also after one of my favourite Quaker Science Fiction novels. I might also post there, occasionally. We'll see.

3) I became a dual American / Canadian citizen as of June 22, 2007. My partner dan and I moved here from the US in August 2001, so he could take the position of professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

4) When we moved here, I was a self-employed web application developer, for a much-younger Web. My business-partner and I made our first $2,000 out of a meeting at Comdex in 1996. I look back on those days fondly but definitely don't miss them! I worked for various companies doing Web 1.0 stuff; but I really hated chasing down clients for payment. I started working at the University of Waterloo in November 2004, in a job that was roughly 75% my dream job. Since then I've changed bosses ~~six~~ eight times, but still work for the same unit, Computer Science. My job is currently 100% my dream job. The me-of-half-my-lifetime-ago would be astounded. I expect I will stay at the University until I retire.

5) In July 2002, we adopted the cutest puppy in the world. At the time Rover was six weeks old. It was a few weeks later that we discovered that a certain number of people are offended that we named a girl dog Rover. I was really perplexed. I'm told that her cousin Sonia the Samoyed wanted to know if she's a squeak-toy or a snack. She really was the best dog. She lived to a ripe old 16 years, and we miss her all the time.

In August 2021, we adopted the director of the River Institute who is an absolute delight. And very photogenic. River is learning new things every day; even if it is "what is the best way to arrange my blankets for napping?"

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